Home  Table of Contents Next

Eyes of Glass - Hearts of Stone

Chapter Forty-six

The crunch of gravel in the driveway alongside the house associated with Dave so strongly that Lori rolled to her feet in a panic. Dave was the last person in the world she wanted to deal with at the moment. She leaped into the shadows at the sound of footsteps on the front porch, knowing that Dave would have gone to the back door.

The intruder tried the unlocked door, and then pushed it open to let in the cold night. After a pause of indecision, he entered and closed it behind him. A dark shape walked to the couch, stared down at the crumpled blanket and pillow, and then reached for her.

"Behind you, Trent."

He whirled in surprise. Light from outside glimmered along the chromed barrel of her handgun. He became as motionless as a statue.

"Lori, what do you think you're doing?"

"Waiting for an explanation," she said softly.

"Lori, I'm here to get you and the kids out of town. Now. Tonight. You're not safe here." His voice trailed off with a note of puzzlement. His eyes were on the gun.

He took an unthinking step forward. "Lori..."

She raised the gun a bit higher, stopping him. "Not until this is over," she said in a whisper.

"Lori, you've got to let me help."

“Do you know who it is?”

He paused. “No, but…”

"Then you can't help. Not now, not a week, a month, or a year from now. Trent, go away. Don’t say another word to me. Just leave.”

He stared at her, stalling for time to think his way through the situation. He had no way to force the issue, and she had no way to resolve it. After a quiet moment, he nodded his understanding and backed from the house and closed the door as quietly as he had entered. Lori stepped to the window and watched him drive away, knowing he wouldn't go far. He'd park nearby and stake out the house.

She sank to the floor in the corner of the living room, shaking uncontrollably, certain that the damage inflicted upon their lives was irreparable regardless of what else might happen during the course of the night. She leaned her head against the wall, eyes open to the darkness, psychologically and physically numb. It would be daylight soon, and absolutely nothing had been resolved.

Glass shattered in the kitchen. Lori struggled from her confusion in a panic, suddenly aware that she had drifted asleep within the depth of her terrible fatigue. “Stupid, stupid,” she hissed to the darkness and clambered to her feet with the gun held out in both hands.

A figure erupted from the darkened kitchen and careened against the table in the dining room, scattering chairs, grunting and pushing his way toward her. Her last gesture of defiance was to raise the barrel of the revolver and pull the trigger.

The crack and smell of cordite reminded Lori of an innocent fourth of July firecracker. How could it hope to stop the monster looming over her? He grunted, not slowing. Again she fired, then three more times.

Dave had warned her about the ineffectiveness of a small-caliber handgun. The intruder faltered, but charged on with a roar and filled her field of vision. He bowled her over backward and fell dead weight across her lower body. She could not tell if he had fallen because she had shot him, or because he was drunk. She could smell alcohol on his breath. She thrashed in a blind frenzy to free herself even as she tried to decide who he was.

He clawed at her, raking her blouse from her shoulders and gouging her breasts with coarse fingernails. She screamed in outrage and sank her teeth in his arm without any indication that he could feel the pain. He groped for the pistol she held at bay at arm's length and finally managed to wrench it from her hand and stuff it in his pocket.

His fingers caught in her hair. His free hand clamped about her throat, cutting off all but a strangled gasp for air. Slowly, clumsily, he struggled to his feet, pulling her up with him until she dangled in his grasp. Her bare feet cleared the living room rug with inches to spare, and all she could think was that it was not the arm that had taken her in the shed. Ruben, and now this monster, and there was still another out there somewhere who would hurt her, given the chance.

She saw his ashen face in a glimmer of light from outside. Carl Adler was bleeding. He had bled all over her living room rug. Perhaps he would die here. At least Sheriff Danielson would be able to identify him. Her last clear thought was one of regret that Trent had not come to her rescue. He had only seconds left to do so before the hand about her throat choked the consciousness and maybe the life from her body. He should have heard the gunshots from nearby.

Awareness thereafter came and went like a flickering candle. She was vaguely aware of being carelessly dragged like a bag of laundry through the darkened yards of unlit houses. She awoke again lying stunned and staring mindlessly at a stained ceiling. She lay on a crumpled, stinking bed in a cramped bedroom covered with yellowed wallpaper. A bare, forty-watt bulb glowed from the cracked ceiling in the adjacent living room.

Her throat ached from the near strangulation. She turned her head to where she heard movement. Burning pain lanced through her neck as a reward, and her shoulders felt wrenched from their sockets. Livid abrasions covered her arms and legs. What was left of her clothing smelled like tar. But she had shot him, and she had hit him more than once, because she was covered in blood not her own.

Shadows moved on the walls in the bathroom. Water gurgled in a sink, a background noise to low moans and drunken gasps of pain. She forced herself to relax and closed her eyes to ease a bout of vertigo. He'd bleed to death and die.

She lay trembling in shock, slowly gathering her wits about her. When she felt clear-headed enough to attempt an escape, she sat up, stifling a cry of pain, but strong enough now to stand. But the bedsprings creaked, and Carl Adler came barreling from the bathroom with a snarl of anger. His bare chest leaked blood from two holes, one in his shoulder, and the other just below his ribcage. She took in his twisted expression of anger and brought her arms up before her face. He swept her futile resistance away, grabbed her by the throat, and slammed her back down against the bed.

He held her pinned deep into the mattress smelling of stale sweat. Her arms and legs flailed about like the limbs of a shaken rag doll. From some curiously detached state of consciousness, she told herself to relax. If escape was impossible, maybe she could fool the man into thinking she had lost consciousness. She had tried that tactic once before in the garage. It hadn't worked then, but this wasn't the same man.

The moment he had subdued her, Carl Adler did relax. He gazed drunkenly at her. Tears flowed from eyes rheumy with intoxication. They were filled as well with a pain that had nothing to do with the physical injuries she had inflicted.

He took her by the shoulders and shook her vigorously. "There couldn't have been any pictures!" he roared. "I burned everything! Their souls burn in hell for what they did!"

Lori raked his face with her fingernails. He bellowed in pain and averted his head. She twisted free in the other direction and dropped onto the floor on hands and knees just out of his reach. "But it didn't end!" she screamed back at him, enraged that he could deny that he was responsible for the deaths she had uncovered. "Ronnie found pictures! I saw them!"

"She's right, you know."

The third, deep, but much softer voice sent them both whirling about in startled surprise. Benjamin Radcliff stood in the bedroom doorway with Lori's forgotten pistol clutched in his right hand. He grinned at Carl Adler's expression of astonishment. "Hey, this is going to work out swell. Shot with Lori's own pistol, the last of your many victims. It'll be a suicide, of course, seeing as you're not going to get away with this murder like you've gotten away with the others."

Carl Adler staggered from side to side to keep his balance. He was frowning in confusion, peering through a fog of alcohol and clearly bewildered by this turn of events.

Benjamin chuckled in amusement. "Isn't that ironic? He hasn't the slightest idea of what I'm talking about."

"You're the one who used the room with the steel door," Lori said in abrupt insight. "The pictures were yours."

Benjamin glared at her with ill-concealed rage. "Yes, they certainly were mine. Carl here destroyed the photographic records of my predecessors a long time ago, but I had accumulated years of my own. It's your fault, you nasty little bitch, that I had to burn it all. Now I'm going to have to start all over again. I'll start with you, of course."

Carl Adler launched himself toward the man with a mindless roar of anger. Half drunk and poorly coordinated, Benjamin could have sidestepped him. The grocer and butcher would have fallen unconscious to the floor and may have quietly died in any event. Instead, the crack of the revolver snapped at Lori's ears followed by a spray of hot blood and bits of white bone stinging the side of her face. Fearful that the last bullet in the gun was for her, Lori dodged Carl Adler's falling body. She rolled to the floor and launched herself between Benjamin and the door jamb. For the briefest instant, she felt certain she could avoid his groping hand. And then his fingers tangled in her hair and brought her up short.

The pain of hair torn from their roots brought tears to her eyes. She reached back over her head and tried to rake his arms with her fingernails. She shrieked in a rage as primal and intense as had been Carl Adler's last moment of defiance.

He struck her alongside the head with the pistol. A silent storm of pain and confusion crashed through her body, sending her sprawling across the floor.

Benjamin Radcliff chuckled in the quietness that ensued. He casually entwined his hand in her hair for a firmer grip and dragged her through the apartment and down a flight of stairs to the store below. The brutal pounding stunned her back to the ragged edge of consciousness.

He dragged her to her feet somewhere in the back of the store and when his arm brushed the side of her face, she finally managed to identify her assailant in the shed that summer night of the mewing kitten. Benjamin Radcliff had failed in his first attempt to take his chosen prey. There was no one to stop him now.

Ben scooped her into his arms and dumped her across the bloodstained butcher block behind the counter of Carl Adler's Grocery and Meat Market. Lori lay in a haze of confusion, telling herself that this was not as yet the consummation of her recurring nightmare. The details of the dream that had haunted her for so long could never be fulfilled. The room with the steel door had been destroyed. This would be another nightmare altogether. An original. If Trent was going to save her, he had only moments remaining to do so.

The dream of the glass eye had been a dream of forewarning after all, just as Maggie had suspected, and not entirely premonitory. The dream was a memory etched indelibly somewhere beyond space and time. They had known she would be next. They had counted on her to stop him. She had been their only hope for vengeance, and she was failing them. She could feel them stirring in the background of her weakened stream of consciousness, wrought with despair and sadness.

A door creaked open. A chill of a Halloween night swept across her feverish body. The lid of a car trunk opened and slammed in the alley behind the store. Ben dragged something heavy behind him on the way back in. Only after the door was closed and locked did the overhead lights flash brutally into her eyes.

She jammed her eyes closed against the glare and turned her head. The movement sent another stab of pain shooting through her neck. The impact of the pistol against her skull had set her ears to ringing. She felt sick to her stomach.

Metal clasps unsnapped loudly in the silence followed by the metallic clanking of equipment being unloaded and assembled. It would begin soon, but she didn't want the glass eye to be part of it. Of all the humiliation and suffering he had inflicted upon his victims, the photographs that Ronnie Bates had found in the room with the steel door had been the vilest. To think that Wendy and Leslie might someday stumble upon a record of her own last waking nightmare…

He placed a tripod at the end of the chopping block and attached the glass eye, a camcorder, to record a three-quarter view just above her right foot, his favorite perspective. A tiny red light glowed. She saw the glass eye twist to focus upon her with mechanical precision.

He stood over her then, grinning maniacally. His eyes darted to and fro over her exposed body in a hungered frenzy. Beads of perspiration broke out across his receding hairline.

He reveled in her torment. He waited until a jangled nerve set a muscle to twitching, and then he drank in the play of muscle with eyes black with dilated pupils. The unsteady rise and fall of her breasts entranced him. His own breathing became erratic. Moment by moment, she could feel the lethal danger of his passion grow.

"Sheriff Danielson knows everything." The sound of her voice was a hoarse whisper only marginally audible. It hurt to try to talk, but she had to distract him. Every minute she could buy would be a minute free of terrible suffering.

Benjamin's smile twitched. "He knows nothing."

"I told him everything," she spat.

He chuckled again in disdain. "You know nothing."

Deep inside her, they whispered urgently. It was imperative that she stall for time. "Jessica Bates," she spat at him in a rage that was not her own, and Benjamin's eyes went wide with shock.

Home  Table of Contents Next